Sowell on multiculturalism
Yesterday, commenter “Paul Nachman” kindly drew our attention to this talk by Thomas Sowell on multicultualism. It was given some time in the 1990s, and displays Sowell’s characteristic sharpness of observation and clarity of expression He grasped the problem long before most people even noticed the phenomenon.
An excerpt:
But is there any evidence that colleges that have gone whole hog into multiculturalism have better relations among the various groups on campus? Or is it precisely on such campuses that separatism and hostility are worse than on campuses that have not gone in for the multicultural craze?
You want to see multiculturalism in action? Look at Yugoslavia, at Lebanon, at Sri Lanka, at Northern Ireland, at Azerbaijan, or wherever else group “identity” has been hyped. There is no point in the multiculturalists’ saying that this is not what they have in mind. You might as well open the floodgates and then say that you don’t mean for people to drown. Once you have opened the floodgates, you can’t tell the water where to do.
By the way, it was in the early 1990s that I went back to the university to get my MFT degree, and I noticed that things had changed tremendously since my last foray as a student in the 1970s. Wokeism, post-modernism, the elevation of feelings over thought, and various “critical studies” teaching philosophies were very much in the ascendance, and the pernicious effects were already becoming noticeable, although I did not understand their full ramifications.
Multiculturalism isn’t supposed to cultivate improved relations between sections of the populace. Its purpose is to balkanize the populace, since minority groups fall for the fallacy that liberals are their friend and salvation.
Is not the citizenry bombarded every day and from every angle, through every medium and on every platform, with the mindless slogan most beloved by leftists? In truth, it was a none-too-bright Republican (Dan Quayle) who popularized these vacuous words (“Diversity Is Our Strength”).
In truth, it was a none-too-bright Republican (Dan Quayle) who popularized these vacuous words.
Huh?
As far as I could ever see, the measures which fell under the rubric of ‘multiculturalism’ all had the object of displacing the extant population and indicia of it’s culture and interests. They all had the effect of aggrandizing the position of the professoriate and the educational apparat generally as arbiters of value.
The current “anti-racist” programs (which are in truth racist) are intent upon creating competing tribes. Their problem may be that if the European-Americans, who are still the majority, in fact become a “tribe,” the results for others are likely to be really ugly. Nobody should want this.
Dan Quayle was a Republican on the national stage, which means the press was going to cover him as evil or stupid, and Quayle won ‘stupid’ because he was willing to believe a flashcard that read “potatoe” when the cameras were rolling.
After ocasio cortez they cant call anyone dumb nor katherine harris or cabbage patch girl
Mark Steyn, in 2009, on multiculturalism:
“Diversity” is one of those words designed to absolve you of the need to think. Likewise, a belief in “multiculturalism” doesn’t require you to know anything at all about other cultures, just to feel generally warm and fluffy about them.
And here’s New York Timesman [yes!!] Richard Bernstein from the prologue of his terrific 1994 book Dictatorship of Virtue: How the Battle Over Multiculturalism Is Reshaping Our Schools, Our Country, and Our Lives:
[The self-proclaimed multiculturalists] rarely, at least as I have gotten to know them, know much about culture at all and even more rarely about somebody else’s culture. There are interesting and worthy and certainly very well-intentioned people within the ranks of what I will call the ideological multiculturalists. And yet their lack of curiosity about the real cultural richness of the world, or their reduction of that richness to a few rhapsodic cliches, seem to confirm that culture is not really what is at issue in multiculturalism. At best, the ideological multiculturalists reiterate a few obsessively sincere phrases about the holistic spirit of Native American cultures or about how things are done in what they call the Asian culture or in the African-American culture.
The Asian culture, it happens, is something I know a bit about, having spent five years at Harvard striving for a PhD in a joint program called History and East Asian Languages and, after that, living either as a student (for one year) or a journalist (for six years) in China and Southeast Asia. At least I know enough to know that there is no such thing as the “Asian culture.” There are dozens of cultures that exist in that vast geographical domain called Asia. When the multiculturalists speak, tremulous with respect, of the “Asian culture,” it is out of goodness of heart, but not much actual knowledge.
[pp 5 – 6; paragraph break added for readability]
Dan Quayle was a Republican on the national stage, which means the press was going to cover him as evil or stupid, and Quayle won ‘stupid’ because he was willing to believe a flashcard that read “potatoe” when the cameras were rolling.
Thanks for the witless insult to Quayle. Doesn’t elucidate je’s point one bit.
Around the same time, liberal historian and Kennedy family sycophant, Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. wrote an excellent critique of multiculturalism: The Disuniting of America. Unlike the Bernstein book, it is available on Kindle.
The cognitive ability of college students has been declining for years. The best evidence of this decline are data from the highly respected “General Social Survey” on mean IQ by decade among graduate students, undergraduates, and high school students. High school graduates in the 1960s had an average IQ of 99.3 but this figure declined in the 2010s, it was 93.5. A similar drop occurred among college graduates — from 113.3 in the 60s to 100.4 in the 2010 decade. For those with graduate degrees, the fall was from 114.0 to 105.8. Assuming you need to score 110 on an IQ test to do college level work, most of the students in college today are incapable of college level work. Thats why lyou have all the courses in basket weaving, pottery, journalism, and teacher education. (couldn’t resist taking a dig at teachers)
long before most people even noticed the phenomenon
Don’t include me in that “most”. I (and most people I knew) knew there was a problem in the 80s and spoke about it.
Look at how many of the 15 quasi-independent republics that comprised the former USSR decided to join the new Russian Federation in 1991.
As best as I can figure it, ZERO of them.
So much for diversity, and in this instance, capitalism cannot be blamed (and neither can the disintegration of Yugoslavia be blamed on capitalism).
Let’s not forget how well diversity has / is working in sub-Saharan Africa. And IIRC, when the first Europeans landed in N.America, the numerous indigenous tribes were not just one big happy diverse nation.
Multiculturalism simply requires that you hate the appropriate people.
Good summary.
It’s a long-used tactic by the Communist International (the first Globalist organization) to divide and undermine societies around the world to set the stage for revolution of the proletariat. It’s old news, rebranded, by a multi-headed movement that they and their fellow travelers never gave up. It wasn’t a Russian movement… it started in England in the late 19th century but the first place it ever succeeded was in Russia, post-WWI in 1919. The Soviets became its protector and chief sponsor … it consumed more than the Soviet military budget prior to WWII. The point is all these tactics (DEI,DSG,BLM,Antifa, ungendering, Alinsky’s rules, etc) are from a playbook that has been in use since the ‘20’s. It’s being used now with more success as the collapse of the original place the revolution succeeded recedes in history, beyond the keen of the young and uneducated (and I’m speaking here of Ivy League grads too). We get our dander up and confront each tactic one-by-one without facing the reality of the movement. The fellow travelers just shift to the next tactic, knowing they can rebrand and come back to the one just abandoned eventually. You can fool some of the people all of the time.
Thats why lyou have all the courses in basket weaving, pottery, journalism, and teacher education. (couldn’t resist taking a dig at teachers)
You’re not going to find courses in basket weaving outside of odd redoubts like the School of American Crafts at RIT. J-schools and teachers colleges may be sinkholes of studpidity; the former have been around for three generations and the latter for five generations.
Again, what you’re not noticing is that a far larger segment of the young adult population is traipsing through these institutions than was the case 50 years ago.
Robert Hughes (art critic, liberal, author of Shock of the New) also wrote a critique of multiculturalism, “Culture of Complaint – The Fraying of America” published in 1993, and is still relevant today.
The greatest scandal about the Dan Quayle episode was that the school had been supplied with and didn’t notice a flashcard that misspelled potato. Either that or they left off the last letter of potatoes. Trying to bring this up at the time elicited blank stares or “Well maybe, but…”
I suspect that compared with most national politicians, Quayle was not that bright. An opinion journalist who met him described him as the sort of person who repeats the punchlines of jokes in less subtle terms. He didn’t last long as a working lawyer; after a couple of years he was assigned to a position in the family newspaper business. He was a bad fit for an executive position where he would be the principal decision-maker, so not the optimal choice for the position as VP. It’s a stupid 5th wheel job which ought to be abolished, of course. Since the person who holds it has a 25% chance of succeeding to the presidency, you should stick someone in the position who is familiar with the work of an executive. Per Fred Barnes, George Bush the Elder picked someone consequent to his being touted by a couple of his aides. George Bush the Elder had his virtues, but his decision-making was not error free.
Quayle wasn’t an idiot, though. Idiots do not pass the Indiana bar exam on their first attempt. (John Kennedy Jr required three attempts to pass the New York bar exam). He didn’t have any obtrusive character defects. So, the media set about a full-court information op to denigrate him which extended to attacks on his wife. If our appellate courts hadn’t granted a warm little gift to the media by gutting defamation law, some outlets would have been liable. The articles about his military service record were repulsive as were the Doonesbury cartoons retailing the fictions of one Brett Kimberlein.
It’s a long-used tactic by the Communist International
[eyeroll]
Me: “Kids, don’t go out (in the winter) with a wet head. Let your hair dry first.”
Children: (eye roll).
Another tactic. Not communist though.
Having retired in 1999, I mostly missed diversity re-education. I can remember barking my shins on the general topic twice and feeling alarm. One was when a senior colleague took offense at my skepticism about affirmative action. It seemed like a great idea to be careful in interviewing candidates not to make the mistake of overestimating the abilities of someone who simply “looked like us.” I tried to be careful to hunt for the true qualities of success rather than what would make someone’s company or conversation comfortably familiar because of shared interests in non-professional areas. It’s also good to expand the search pool to include sources we might have overlooked. But the idea that we’d hire someone who clearly lacked the necessary horsepower because he or she was a member of a targeted racial group struck me as suicidal for the firm and unfair to the hiree.
The other was the only class I was ever subjected to that was basically sensitivity training. The trainer was shocked to learn that several of us would level harsh criticism at a specimen of flabby, muddy writing even though the author was black. We felt it would be an intolerable insult to do otherwise. What should the message be, this is gobbledegook, but we’re not going to say so because it’s the best we could expect from someone who belongs to a societal splinter we expect not to measure up? You don’t deserve to be judged by the same standards we apply to our august selves?
Wendy Laubach
My take on 1619 is that if it were submitted as a college term paper in, in the days when grades had to be earned and if the grader were unaware of her race, Hannah-Jones would have gotten a C+ to B- for 1619. I was going to say, “how can the NYT let such sloppy writing get into print?” but I have seen other disasters published in the NYT.